The advent of network-based e-commerce has had a dramatic impact on the way in which businesses interact with each other. The fact that business enterprises operating on different computing platforms, can leverage the platform independent power of the Internet to seamlessly interchange data with one another has created a new awareness of the competitive advantages that may secured by closely integrating the members of a commercial supply chain. A manufacutring entity, for example, can now share real-time data regarding its production operations with its raw material suppliers to enable a more efficient allocation of those raw materials, in turn decreasing inventory costs and ensuring that production by the manufacturer more closely reflects product demand. As a consequence, production cycles run more efficiently and dollar advantages garnered by the supply chain members should markedly increase. However, the mere existence of the Internet as a backbone for supporting the bussiness-to-business interactions of the members of a supply chain is not itself sufficient for the full realization of such marketplace efficiencies.
While the Internet provides a readily available common backbone for inter-enterprise communication, the data processing environments within each enterprise may be markedly dissimilar, thus, merely enabling data flow between enterprises does not address fundamental processing system incompatibilities therebetween. In certain areas this issue is being addressed by adoption of standardized data description paradigms such as those found in the widely adopted eXtensible Markup Language (XML) which, along with the older Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has established some standards for inter-enterprise data exchange. While EDI and XML may address many issues regarding inter-enterprise data communication, it is an inevitability that much of the data exchange required for an efficiently functioning supply chain, will involve data which is resident in legacy data processing systems in the various enterprises, and exists in formats that are incompatible with the processing systems of the various members of the supply chain. Moreover, it is a certainty that in most cases, these enterprises will not undertake the expensive, time-consuming and risk-laden task of converting their voluminous legacy data into the format of the currently accepted standard. Accordingly, it can be seen that there is a need to provide a seamless data format translation or transcoding scheme to further improve inter-enterprise data exchange.
Since it may often be the case that a requested data file exists within an enterprise in many different formats other than the requested format, a further advantageous aspect of the transcoding scheme would provide logic for selecting the optimal version of a requested data file from which to perform the translation.
A concomitant issue arising from the enhanced ability for inter-enterprise data communications relates to data security. Much of the data that is most important to the efficient operation of an enterprise is the same data for which inter-enterprise communication is necessary to enjoy the aforementioned market efficiencies. Thus, a tension exists between the desire to provide authorized supply chain partners with access to the data that they require to manage their portion of the supply chain, while at the same time ensuring that the data does not become available to unintended recipients such as competitors, customers, and other suppliers.
General Electric Global eXchange Services provides a service called Tradanet (R) (Tradanet is a registered trademark of General Electric Company, USA, headquatered in Gaithersburg, Md.) which offers some of these features (see, for example, the Internet URL: http://www.gegxs.com/geiscom/template.jsp?page=1&id=11). In particular, Tradanet offers the ability for an enterprise to transmit formatted documents via a secure Internet or other network connection to its authorized global trading partners. However, the Tradanet service requires that the formats for such documents be pre-established at the enterprise and does not afford a mechanism whereby a partner may request a document in a format other than those pre-established by the enterprise. Hence, in the absence of a translation or transcoding feature, the Tradanet solution to fails to address the aforementioned compatibility issues and is, in essence, merely a secure document repository.
In view of the foregoing it can be seen that a solution is needed which addresses these security and compatibility issues so as to enable an enterprise to provide access to any and all data it deems valuable in promoting the efficient operation of its supply chain.